Blind (In)Justice Wednesday, Oct 31 2007

I’m probably going to go to hell for writing this post.  You may go to hell just for reading it 

Remember the blind cafeteria lady and I was all, “Ohhhh, her quirks are so charming and funny, ha ha ha?”  WELL.  No more.  It is ON like Donkey Kong, Blind Cafeteria Lady.  I’m staging a one-woman boycott.  Or, uh, girlcott, as it would be.

Oftentimes in the morning I will purchase a 16 oz. cup and fill it either with a coffee/hot chocolate mixture (and I bring my own hot chocolate mixture, thank you very much, because the pricing on that caused even more confusion) or hot water, with which I make my own tea.  And she always tells me to bring it back because I can get a refill.  In fact, one time I got water and she even SPECIFICALLY SAID that the water was free and I was paying for the CUP.  That piece of information will prove to be important. 

I don’t often remember to bring the cup back at lunch, but occasionally I do hold on to it and wash it out and bring it back and refill it with Diet Coke or iced tea and pay the refill price, whatever the stupid refill price happens to be that day.  And she has never — NEVER — said a word to me. 

Until yesterday, when I told her I had a refill and she was all, “Is that the cup you had coffee in earlier?”  I informed her that, in fact, I had had hot water and that now I had iced tea. 

Well.  NOW she informs me that I can’t get a refill of something different!  That I have to get a refill of the same thing!  The same thing being hot water, of course. 

So I promptly threw a big ole bitch-fit.  I had only brought down 50 cents, and besides, she always lets me pay the refill price, no matter what the drink I had the first time was and what the drink I am purchasing the second time is.  If McDonald’s changed their policies all willy-nilly like that, they’d have no customers left!  It’s riiiiidiculous. 

So for now, I’m avoiding the cafeteria and the mean cafeteria lady and her stupid refill policies.  We’ll see how long it lasts.

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Randomosity Tuesday, Oct 30 2007

This is going to be a collection of little bits and pieces of things that have absolutely nothing to do with one another…

The aforementioned blind cafeteria lady keeps her satellite radio tuned to an oldies station and I swear, the last three or four times I have gone in there, the song “Boy from New York City” has ALWAYS been playing.  Which is funny, because it’s a song we did in show choir in high school, which means that I always get the urge to sing along and bust out in a box step with some jazz hands.  Except that might be embarassing, you know.

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The last couple weeks my friends and I have been consumed with a lot of hubbub and hullabaloo over what is right and wrong and appropriate and inappropriate regarding one of our friend’s upcoming weddings.  You see, said friend at first was having a regular but very very small wedding with a dress and a couple attendants (sister and sis-in-law) and whatnot.  Then that was cancelled and in it’s place she declared that she wanted nothing big and no fuss and they were just going to go to the courthouse with their parents and that was it.  Except that she expected her friends (that would be us) to throw her a bridal shower!  And we were all, “Whaaaaat????”  She wasn’t even inviting us to her no-fuss non-wedding wedding and she expected a full-on bridal shower??  So there were a lot of e-mails and discussions and arguments and the bride got her feelings hurt and the mother of the bride did some yelling and all us friends got our feelings hurt and we tried to compromise by suggesting a smaller spa day, vis a full tilt boogie bridal shower and lo, it was all very uncomfortable and ugly. 

The result?  Now there is a real bridal shower being hosted by a friend of the mother of the bride to which we are invited.  AND the spa day we suggested the following weekend, for which we will be paying for the bride’s services.  AND a slightly larger wedding at the home of the brides parents two weekends later to which a very small group of guests will be invited, us included, which I suppose means we need to bring a gift to as well and dayum, all of the sudden that is THREE SEPARATE MONEY SPENDING OPPORTUNITIES.  Which seems like, I don’t know, a heck of a lot of FUSS for such a low-key bride!  Sigh. 

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Remember the guy from her school that Best Friend A was trying to hook me up with?  Well we went to the school fundraising thing with her a couple weeks ago and were introduced and he was really nice and cute and that was all good.  And then I tagged along with my friend and her husband to a party that he (the guy in question) was hosting at his house on Saturday night, when I’m sure I dazzled him with my knowledge of pop culture because our girls team SCHOOLED his guys team in the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture DVD Game.  That is, if I didn’t scare him off with my uber-competitive nature and all the screaming and the screeching and fist-pumping.  I have to say, he seemed somewhat competitive too, for when Best Friend A pulled some questionable moves with the dice to get the necessary 2 that would land us on our last needed pie space, he began calling our team the Cheeter Girls. 

Oh, and earlier in the evening I was on his team for one of those electronic trivia games, like the kind they have in bars, which was all well and good (Best Friend A was pretty much ready to send out the wedding announcements when he declared that I was on his team), except I totally boffed one of the questions and lost our team a bunch of money and we never did recover from that wrong answer and lost and it was sad. 

But it was a really fun evening and I like anyone that can be as dorkily enthusiastic about board games as I can, so we shall see what happens next.  Best Friend A is supposed to be, I don’t know, dropping subtle hints about me but ohmigod, subtle is sooo not her strong suit so I could be in trouble.

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I cannot deny it any more.  Today is Oct. 30, 2007.  Which means that tomorrow is the 31st and the day after that is the 1st of November and in 13 days I will be 30.  Oh.  God.

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Side Effects May Include… Friday, Oct 26 2007

A couple years ago my doctor put me on a daily medicine called Elavil to help prevent migraines.  When I got my first dose, the pharmacist handed me one of those looong documents that described every side effect and complication that the medication may cause.  It was long, the print was small and of course I didn’t read it.

Within the next few weeks I slowly began to realize that I was craving sugar and sweet things more and more.   I hit rock bottom the night I took a pat of butter from the fridge, mixed it with brown sugar (you know, like you do when you’re making cookies) and ate it out of the bowl just like that.  Suddenly it occured to me that this was a little weird, so off to the helpful Internet I went. 

Turns out, a wacky side effect of Elavil is an increased craving for sweets.  Whaddya know!  Remember this tale.

Fast forward 2+ years.  The Elavil is not working, as evidenced by my near-daily migraines.  The doctor decides it is time for the big guns of the migraine-prevention world — Topamax.  Topamax must be adjusted to gradually, so I started on it last Sunday with one pill a day and will spend the next month building up a tolerance or some such thing. 

Now, I did read (okay, skimmed) the drug literature this time.  Frankly, most of the drug literature always sounds the same but I read it.  I even re-read it to see if it listed sleeplessness, because when I take the stupid Topamax at night it causes me to, well, be sleepless. 

Now here is the sad part of today’s tale.  As I am a 29-year-old girl, you can imagine that I love the Diet Coke.  It is a cliche, yes.  But I am a Diet Coke girl.  My bloodstream is probably composed of equal parts Diet Coke and Starbucks with some margarita thrown in for good measure.

And the few times I have had Diet Coke this week they have always tasted weird.  Flat-ish.  I thought it was the cafeteria Diet Coke, and then the Subway Diet Coke, but I also had a canned Diet Coke, which is usually the best Diet Coke of the bunch and they’ve tasted weird too.

So today, in the course of googling Topamax and side effects to research the sleeplessness factor, I discovered that many patients complained that Topamax MAKES SODA TASTE WEIRD.  And FLAT.  Topamax RUINS DIET COKE. 

This was definitely not listed in the stupid pharmacy literature!  Nor was it mentioned by my doctor.  Because if I was asked to choose between cosntant migraines and constant weird-tasting and flat-ish Diet Coke, I…would have a very tough time choosing. 

Also?  My beloved Starbuck’s Sugarfree Hazelnut Non-Fat Latte (SFHNFL) this morning tasted super-sweet and not right at all.  Y’all, I’m not sure I can face a life without Diet Coke AND SFHNFLs. 

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Blind Tasting Wednesday, Oct 24 2007

I was going to write a whiny post about the darkness and despair of my rapidly approaching 30th birthday, but that sounds depressing.  Instead, I’m going to talk about our cafeteria at work, which is probably far more amusing. 

Under some obscure, probably gazillion-dollar federal program, operation of our workplace cafeteria has been outsourced for some time to a blind lady.  Well, she’s not completely bind.  She’s…visually impaired, I guess.  And the woman who actually does most of the cooking is not blind at all. 

But having a visually-impaired food service person leads to some, uh, odd scenarios.  Like that fact that when you check out, you have to narrate what you ordered, so she can be sure to charge you the right amount.  And sometimes she can’t tell if the produce she’s received is good or not, so you might end up with salads that look a little…questionable. 

One time, I believe, she put cinnamon instead of chili powder in chili.  Which she was actually sort of proud about, I think. 

Then there is her bizarre, byzantine pricing methods.  There often seems to be no rhyme or reason to how much you pay for the same thing day to day.  For example, I generally get a 20 oz. cup of soda, for which I pay $1.10.  If I get a refill, it’s 55 cents.  But then the other day she told me that if I’m getting iced tea and not soda, it’s a dollar?  And refills are only 50 cents?  And then the other day I got charged 55 cents for a refill on a smaller cup. 

The blind cafeteria lady is perfectly nice, but her quirks are really starting to bug me and the food isn’t that great.  Sometimes it’s worth it just to go and see what’s she misspelled on her menu board for the day.  My personal favorite?  Any time she advertises “Notchos.”

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BFF (Best Friends Forever) Thursday, Oct 18 2007

My best friend A turned 30 on Saturday.  We had a good old-fashioned slumber party planned, complete with dinner and cupcakes and board games and hairbrushing and manicures.  In the end, we didn’t actually stick around for the slumbering part, because what Best Friend A didn’t know was that her husband would be returning that evening, a day early, from a 6-month deployment.  He had secretly contacted Best Friend T and we had conspired to have another friend pick up at the airport and arrive just in time to wish his wife a happy birthday.  It was great.

2007 dawned a bit ominously, because it was the year that all of my girlfriends and I would turn 30 — first Best Friend T in January, then Friend B in June, Best Friend A in October, and then both myself and Friend Al in November. 

In the case of Best Friend A and Best Friend T, I have know these girls since the first year of high school.  For 15 years.  For half our lives.  And the thing is, we’re still best friends.  We’ve gone from exchanging gossipy notes in junior English class to exchanging gossipy e-mails while at work.  Our marathon phone conversations in high school and college may be a little shorter now and accompanied by shrieking children, or held while we’re rushing to and from work and school and classes, but we still talk constantly.  We see each other every week almost, sometimes more than once.  We still have sleepovers and movie nights. 

15 years of friendship hasn’t always gone smoothly.  There were times when we were fighting or weren’t speaking at all, for months or even years.  Our lives went in wildly divergent ways and we all met different people and had different experiences and made other friends who enriched different times of our lives.

But I can say now that my two best friends today are the same women I would have said were my best friends 15 years ago.  Last night we saw a high school acquaintance who thought it was so great that the three of us had stayed so close.  I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I guess it is a little unusual.  It’s amazing. 

I’ve played witness to everything that has happened in their lives for the last 15 years.  I worried when A decided to leave her friends and her family and her job to move north with her boyfriend and Iwas so happy when he finally proposed to her.  I stood by their sides at their weddings, and I’ve watched T become a mother. 

We’ve laughed together and god knows we’ve cried.  We have more inside jokes than I can count.  We’ve eaten a lot of dessert and probably drank our weight in Diet Coke.    We grew up together.  We became adults together. 

I have no idea what the next few years will bring.  There’s a good chance that we won’t always be living within the same 30-mile radius, but the best part is that I think our friendship can withstand distance.  They’re as much a part of me as my blood family is.  They’re my BFFs.

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There’s This Guy… Thursday, Oct 11 2007

Supposedly, when you get to be my age (almost 30, gulp) and you’re still single, you’re friends are supposed to be jumping all over themselves to set you up on blind dates.  I base this assumption on years of a steady diet of chick flicks and TV shows (think “When Harry Met Sally”). 

I am here to tell you that NO ONE has ever offered to set me up with anyone.  Oh sure, we get through the first part of it okay: “Hey there’s this guy I work with (or friend of my boyfriend’s or brother-in-law) and he’s cute and I think he’s single…” 

And then that sentence just hangs there and I’m all, “Uh, okay, thanks for the bulletin.”  I never get to meet said cute guy and I certainly never get fixed up with anyone.

(Actually, I stand a little bit corrected because just now the phone rang and it was the long-distance boy with whom I have a dysfunctional, possibly completely dead relationship, and you could sort of say that I was “fixed up” with him by my former boss, but for the purposes of this blog it’s not the same thing.)

I’m not sure why I don’t have a social calendar chock full of blind dates, but it could be one of several reasons, I suppose:

1. People don’t go on blind dates anymore?

2. My friends secretely think I’m ugly or have a boring personality and they don’t want to make any single guys they know suffer through a dinner with me?

3. My friends are big chickens who don’t have, say, Nora Ephron writing a script for them?

Ding ding, I think we have a winner! 

A couple months ago I was sort of mock complaining to Best Friend A (a teacher) about never being fixed up with anybody, and she was all, “Well, I only work with two guys anyway.”  But feeling sorry for her poor, perpetually-single friend, she started investigating one of the male teachers. 

Who, it turns out, is in our age bracket and is single and actually went to our high school (he graduated several years before us, but we knew his younger sister) so now she’s trying to figure out how to orchestrate a “meet cute” moment between us without having to come right out and say, “Would you like to be fixed up with my single friend?” 

So, that could be interesting.  Stay tuned!

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How Rude! Wednesday, Oct 10 2007

So as I was saying yesterday, I went to a wedding reception on Saturday night that started at 7:30.  Of the 8 or so people I knew there, only myself and the bride were actually there at 7:30.  People were wandering into that room for over an hour.

I am fanatical about being on time.  I get that from my dad.  In any situation where I have to be there at a certain time, I will very carefully calculate how much time it will take to get there, and what kind of time cushion I need and I’m generally STILL 5 minutes early.  I have being super-early, but I think 5 minutes early is just good planning.

Because being late?  Is rude.  I’m sorry, but that’s the bottom line.  Rude.

I’m not talking about being 5 minutes late because you got caught in traffic, or you had to run back into the house and get something.  I’m not talking about those occasions where you sleep through your alarm and are late to work.  Life happens to everyone.

I’m talking about being habitually, continually late.  I’m talking about those people who think “being late” is a bad habit like biting your nails or driving too fast.  People who think it’s cute. 

I have friends that expect me to count on the fact that they’re going to be late when we make plans.  I know people that NEVER leave themselves enough time to be out the door before they need to be somewhere, or who have unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to get somewhere, or how many things they can do in a set amount of time. 

And I think it’s just plain rude.  It’s rude to arrive at a party or a reception late without apologizing or giving any reason.  It’s rude to keep people waiting all the time, instead of making an effort to be somewhere when you say you will.  I feel it shows a lack of respect, quite simply put. 

Nothing makes my blood boil more than the instances where I’m sitting in an empty room at5 or 10 minutes past the hour, waiting for the other attendees to show up to a meeting that was supposed to start on the hour.  This frequently happens with my sorority girls and they’re all, “Oh, it’s sorority time, hee hee, we’re always late.” 

Guess what?   We’re all in the same time zone!  Your watch and cell phones and car clocks may have a slightly different time on them, but you can tell when it’s roughly 5 p.m. and roughly 5:15 p.m. and they are not the same thing!

(I also do not get those people who purposefully set their clocks and watches forward or backward or whatever so they’re on time because that would confuse the bejeezus out of me.  I have a very strict relationship with time and I do not like to futz around with it, all willy-nilly.) 

I’m not saying I’m Emily Post or Miss Manners.  I’m sure I commit etiquette faux pas all the time.  I probably say or do things that other people find rude or disrespectful.  To-ma-to, to-mah-to.  And when people are late, I rarely say anything.  I just sit there silently, yelling at them in my head. 

So basically, to me, being late = being rude.  And what I find even more rude is when people expect me to EXPECT them to be late.  Sure, okay, but you may just wind up expecting me to stop showing up at all!

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A Wealth of Material Tuesday, Oct 9 2007

On Saturday evening I got all dressed up and went to a wedding reception.  The bride in question was a member of the sorority chapter that I advise and she is really one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met. 

The wedding was held at 4 p.m. in a town about an hour from here, on the eastern shore of VA.  There was a small reception after the ceremony, and then the invitation also included dinner and dancing at 7:30 p.m. at a local reception hall. 

Because Saturday was also my college homecoming, there was no way I was going to make the ceremony, so I RSVP’d for the reception.  I knew that several other of my sorority girls would be there, so I didn’t feel too self-concious about going by myself. 

So, as I was saying, on Saturday night I got all dressed up and went to a wedding reception.  And that’s where this entry branches into two separate but somewhat related stories and rants:

1. One of my most socially awkard moments EVER.

2. “Fashionably” late is not so fashionable any more and being late is just plain rude. 

(Actually, I could add another one to my list — it’s a little ditty called, Hey girl in the big white dress, you’re the bride so tell your mother and your mother-in-law and the D.J. and the rude cater waiters to stuff it)

 If I could figure out how, I would create a rockin’ “Choose Your Own Adventure” blog entry, but since I’m low-tech, we’ll start with…

AWKward:

I had seen the reception hall place many times, but had never been there before Saturday night.  The reception started at 7:30, so I was careful to get there by 7:20. There were actually several rooms inside, which meant that there were a couple wedding receptions and a class reunion and I didn’t even know what else going on.  I found the right room and looked inside to see 10 or 12 tables, most of which only had 3 – 4 occupants at the moment.  People were eating their salads but the bridal party hadn’t made their entrance.  It was sort of dark and I kept looking around and squinting because I didn’t recognize a damn soul.

I double-checked to make sure I was in the right room.  I asked if there were placecards anywhere.  Two of the tables had reserved signs on them, but apparently the rest were just a free-for-all.  I wandered about, desperately hoping that there would be SOMEONE I knew.  I felt like the biggest idiot alive. 

Finally I thought that I’d just wait outside the room and hopefully one or two sorority girls would show up and we could get a table.  And that was just about the moment that the DJ started announcing the parents and the bridal party.  The bride was in tears because her parents had momentarily stepped outside and, thus, were not there when they were announced and she couldn’t get the announcer to wait five minutes. 

Actually, the first words the bride said to me, while looking completely harried, were: “Don’t ever get married!” 

Eventually I just sat down at a random table and introduced myself to the two other couples there and finally, like, 20 minutes later someone I halfway knew showed up.  She looked as lost and confused as I had probably looked and I saw her sit down at some random table, so I got up and dragged her to where I was sitting.  For which she was eternally grateful. 

By the end of the night, there were 6 or 8 people I knew there, which leads me to the second part of this entry.  Tune in later.

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Girl Does Not Love TiVO THAT Much Tuesday, Oct 2 2007

Every spring and summer I eagerly wait to see what pilots will be picked up and what current shows will return.  I can’t wait until the networks announce their schedules for the fall season so I can figure out what I will be watching every night.  I despair if two shows conflict with each other.

I read about some pilots and think that the premise or the cast or the setting is so interesting that I must watch (Grey’s Anatomy, The OC).  There are some other shows I tune into for the sheer train-wreckedness of it all (The Pussycast Dolls Present The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll, for instance, a show who’s title wins the redundancy award).  Sometimes I read about a pilot and think it’s so wacky it’ll never work and wonder how they’ll sustain it for longer than 6 episodes (Lost is a perfect example and I never would have guessed it would take off like it did.) 

And then, there are some new shows announced and my immediate reaction is “What the hell kind of crack were they smoking??”  This year, that show is ABC’s Cavemen. 

I cannot believe that anyone in their right mind saw those Geico cavemen commercial and thought, “Wow, that would make a great show!”  I cannot believe such a pilot was written and produced.  I cannot believe ABC picked up the pilot.  IT IS ABOUT CAVEMEN.  IT WAS INSPIRED BY A TV COMMERCIAL.  I don’t think there is enough money in the world to convince me to watch this show. 

What’s next, the Gecko gets his own show?  The annoying Shedd’s Spread Country Crock couple?  Please not the totally frighening Burger King puppet guy. 

(This is my last TV post for awhile…I think I’ve mined the subject as much as I can for now.)

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Girl Loves TiVo: Brothers & Sisters Monday, Oct 1 2007

(I know, B&S isn’t a new show, but I’m spreading the love here.)

I looove stories about big, dysfunctional families.  Love them.  Books, movies, TV series…the bigger and more dysfunctional, the better.  I think it’s because I didn’t really have that kind of crazy, amusing dysfunction growing up. 

I mean, my family definitely had our moments and I do have two younger brothers and a large extended family, but due to a number of factors (personality and distance, mostly), we weren’t generally a yelling, fighting family, or one who has lots of secrets, or multitudinous marriages and divorces. 

(Dear Mom and Dad…thank you.  Seriously.  You’re the best.)

Anyway, Brothers & Sisters premiered last season and featured one of those big extended dysfunctional secretive crazy yelling and fighting families.  And the cast was top-notch — Sally Field, Rachel Griffiths, Calista Flockhart, Ron Rifkin, Balthazar Getty, Patricia Wettig and Tom Skerritt, to name the ones that I knew before the show started.

But oddly enough, I didn’t ever watch it.  I think it’s because I missed the premiere and the first couple of weeks and then it sort of felt like the train had left the station and I wasn’t on-board.  Plus, there might have also been another show it conflicted with?  (The Apprentice, maybe, and wow, did I ever make the wrong choice there.)

Then Rob Lowe was added to the cast and I began to hear about how great this show was and towards the end of the season watched a couple episodes here and there.  And fell in love.  Luckily, ABC had every single ep of the first season available to watch over the internet and I managed to catch up.

The premiere set up the simple premise — Sally Field and Tom Skerritt (who also played a married couple in Steel Magnolias) play Nora and William Walker, parents of five grown children: working mom Sarah, Republican Kitty, gay Kevin, newlywed Tommy and drug-addict Army vet Justin.  At the end of that first ep, William dies of a heart attack.  His death sets off a series of revelations and it turns out that none of the Walkers knew him at all. 

The writing is superb — they mix comedy and drama seamlessly, and never dwell on one plotline too long.  And believe me, there are tons of stories to explore with this family.  I especially love the scenes of multi-character dialogue.  They sound like a family.

And, as expected, the whole cast is amazing.  It just seems like they all click, and you can totally buy them as a family.  Two of my favorites are Matthew Rhys and Dave Annable, who play Kevin and Justin, and who were pretty “unknown” compared to the rest of the cast.  Of course, Sally Field BRINGS IT every damn week. 

I bought the Season 1 DVDs a couple weeks ago when they were released and there are some eps I could watch over and over again.  Season 2 premiered last night, and I was so glad…this has quickly become one of my favorite scripted dramas on TV, surpassing the crap that has become Gray’s Anatomy (arrgh, don’t get me started on McDreamy and Mer, George and Izzie, Bailey, et. al). 

If you’re not watching it, you should be.

(Can y’all tell that if I had stuck with journalism as a career, I would have wanted to be writing about TV and films??)

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